


Hidden Annotations

by FictionPenned



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alex asked why we even have this lever, F/F, I mean it's a bit sad, but there's definitely fluff in here, is this fluff?, on my page?, thasmin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-28
Updated: 2020-01-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:42:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22444282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FictionPenned/pseuds/FictionPenned
Summary: In a desperate attempt to steer the conversation towards something more in her purview, the Doctor trundles off on the first tangent that her mind presents as a viable alternative. “Everyone always comments on the romance novels but no one ever reads the 500 years of National Geographic subscriptions. I also have every Nancy Drew book. Always down for a bit of amateur sleuthing, me.” A shrug lifts her shoulders. “Or I just fancy yellow covers. Good color, yellow. Very bright.”Yaz ignores the change of subject, instead turning the book around, pages spread to show off the neat rows of handwriting and lines of pink highlighter. “This one's annotated.”Tired of answering personal questions, the Doctor tries to hide away in the library. Yaz stumbles upon her hiding place quite by accident, but seizes upon the opportunity to talk without risk of the others overhearing.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Comments: 12
Kudos: 167





	Hidden Annotations

The Doctor sits cross-legged in an armchair, a mess of wires in her lap. As a general rule, she doesn’t spend much time in the library. Given that she can devour most books in the space of a few seconds, she doesn’t need to, but it is the safest space in the TARDIS at the moment. Her current group of friends aren’t her most bookish lot, and when they do sneak in and pick something up, they tend to keep it for  _ ages _ . She’s spotted the same book on Graham’s nightstand for weeks now. It’s started to gather dust. Not that she’s complaining, since it means they are unlikely to find her here. It keeps her shielded from uncomfortable questions and the burning pity that has consumed their gazes lately. The fam will check all seventeen garages before they’ll even think to look for her here.    
  
It buys her a bit of time to think and breathe and sort out the tracker that she had fried while hunting for the Master. She wouldn’t have to worry about that if he was as easy to find as Graham’s nightly reading, but he’s always been a slippery one. Probably doesn’t help that she had floundered at the Academy while he latched onto each and every bit of knowledge that had been presented to him. He still knows a ton of tricks that she never even bothered to learn. In fact, she still ignores the most basic tenets of being a Time Lord: don’t interfere, and don’t let anyone know who you are. In all fairness, she has gotten slightly better at following the second one lately, but that’s been a bit of an accident. Doesn’t really count. 

The door squeaks, and her head snaps up. Worry spreads across the back of her tongue like bile. For a moment, she is sorely tempted to dive beneath a desk and hope that no one notices her, but she instead, she freezes, hoping that it’s a wrong turn and that whoever it is will close it again and move on to wherever they meant to go.    
  
It stays open, and the floral notes of Yaz’s perfume waft through the tense air. When they had first met, the Doctor thought of it as a comforting smell, like tea shops and family and fields spread out beneath twin suns. With a dead planet’s worth of secrets hanging over her head, however, even the friendliest scents seem hostile. She may have three people in her TARDIS, may call them her fam and her team, but she has made a conscious effort to keep them at arm’s length.   


It’s been a long time since the Doctor has viewed other people with this kind of indiscriminate suspicion. The Time War had twisted her this same way, made her angry, untrusting, self-isolating, and she can feel it creeping back into her soul again. Trauma is a cyclical thing, especially when the trigger is virtually identical. This destruction might not have happened at her fingertips, but she still feels responsible for it. She should have been there, should have fought harder to keep the Master from slipping down that dark path, should have done anything other than be  _ absent _ .   
  
The gentle padding of Yaz’s feet on the carpet turns the corner, and the Doctor pretends to be busy with the tracker, though she’s quite forgotten what she had been doing.    
  
“Hey you,” Yaz says. “Didn’t expect to see you down here. You’re normally puttering about upstairs.”   
  
The greeting is friendly, and kinder than the Doctor feels like she deserves. Guilt eats away at the inside of her chest, a dangerous cocktail of acid and venom. She should have just left the trio in Sheffield, should have let them get on with their lives and their work and their engineering degrees instead of subjecting them to share the danger and chaos of her lifestyle. It takes her a minute to work the numbness from her tongue and rally a suitable answer. “Wanted a change of scenery.” Her lips tighten into a closed mouth smile that fails to reach her eyes. “What about you? Didn’t think you frequented the library. Don’t people who frequent libraries usually carry books around with them?” She doesn’t mean to sound like she’s conducting an interrogation, but every frantic question seems to dig that hole a little bit deeper. 

Yaz sticks her hands in her pockets and swings one leg wide as she turns to scan the shelves. Mouth curls into a tiny, teasing smirk. Eyes bright, even as she keeps her gaze averted. The Doctor, primed as she is for any oncoming threat, takes note of every quirk, every step, desperately cataloging it all away. But instead of a threat, Yaz serves up only a wry observation. “Sometimes. Especially since I learned that you’re quite the collector of romance novels.”    
  
A flush slinks up the Doctor’s neck, spreading its heat across her cheeks. “Oh, those aren’t mine. People leave things here. I just put them away. Or the TARDIS puts them away. Always re-cataloging things, the TARDIS.” 

Yaz plucks a book free and turns around, leaning against the shelf with an eyebrow cocked. “That many people come through here pining for love? What, do you just pluck young people from their boring lives on the regular?” 

“ _ No! _ ” The denial comes a little too hard and a little too fast to be entirely convincing, so she draws back with a quick breath to steady herself before she repeats. “No. Amy and Rory were married, and Donna couldn’t have been less interested in love. Well --” Her nose scrunches as she reconsiders the claim. “That could’ve had something to do with the fact that her fiancé played consort to a spider queen who wanted to colonize the planet. I’d probably steer a bit clear of love for a while, too. At the very least, she wasn’t interested in me.”

That counts, right? She feels like that should count. 

“Yeah, but did either of them voraciously consume romance novels?” The smirk lingers, voice practically dancing with delight as she works her way around the question. She’s enjoying this, flustering the Doctor a bit, distracting her from the grey mood that’s hung over her for weeks. 

“Amy might’ve. I didn’t think to keep track. Feels like something Amy would do. Do you keep track of what all your friends are reading?” There’s a quick inhale as she fights to gather her wandering thoughts, painfully aware of how out of her depth she is in this kind of context. She has always done her best to stay out of people’s romantic lives, including her own. After all, she had spent a very, very long time running away from River’s affection as soon as she had even begun to  _ think _ of returning it. 

In a desperate attempt to steer the subject towards something more in her purview, she trundles off on the first tangent that her mind presents as a viable alternative. “Everyone always comments on the romance novels but no one ever reads the 500 years of National Geographic subscriptions. I also have every Nancy Drew book. Always down for a bit of amateur sleuthing, me.” A shrug lifts her shoulders. “Or I just fancy yellow covers. Good color, yellow. Very bright.”

Yaz ignores the change of subject, instead turning the book around, pages splayed to show off the neat rows of handwriting and lines of pink highlighter. “This one's annotated.”

The Doctor leaps to her feet, sending wires and hardware crashing to the floor. “Give me that.” The demand is little more than a hiss through gritted teeth as she snatches the worn paperback from Yaz’s fingers, eyes sweeping over the pages. Two sets of notes dominating the space, blue and black letters offering critique of both the material and the thoughts of the first annotator. She recognizes both hands, and the second draws a tiny quiver from her lips.    
  
The Doctor bristles as she shares half of the truth. “It’s Jack’s. You met him. Left half his stuff here over the years, including a gun. Hate it when people bring guns on board. Hate it more when they leave them.” As she speaks, her fingers unconsciously brush across the text, feeling the weight of the pens on the page. For a moment, she considers drawing the book to her nose and taking a deep whiff of the pages, trying to see if she can pick up her wife’s scent among the pages, but she thinks better of doing that in present company. Yaz already thinks that she’s falling apart at the seams, no need to give her more ammunition. 

“And the other?” The question rises expectantly, eager for an answer. 

“The other what?” the Time Lord asks, feigning ignorance.    
  
“The other person. I am a police officer, you know. I know different sets of handwriting when I see them.”

Multiple sets of lies dance upon the tip of the Doctor’s tongue, vying for her attention. In the end, however, she bites them all back. Maybe if she tells the truth in this one instance, then they’ll start trusting her when she feeds them lies when they pry into bigger issues. She isn’t ready to tell them about Gallifrey, or the Master, or her people, but she thinks that she can tell Yaz about River. After all, River’s long gone. 

The Doctor swallows, suddenly aware of how dry her mouth has become. “Professor River Song. We were married. Technically.” The ceremony itself had been performed in an aborted timeline, but they had both counted it as real. It had felt real, up until the very moment in which their timestreams had stopped crossing. It has been an incredibly long time since that last night on Darillium. 

Surprise -- tainted with the slightest amount of embarrassment -- flits across Yaz’s face. “You never told us you were married.” There’s a pause as her mouth opens and closes, fighting to figure out the right words to say, desperately trying to figure out how much of her interest the Doctor has noticed. “I would have never --”   
  
Yaz doesn’t need to deflect. Always oblivious, the Doctor saves her from her worry. 

“Oh, I’ve been married loads of times. At least seven. Twice to the same person. Once to Queen Elizabeth I.” The Doctor closes the book, flipping it over to scan the summary back before stepping past Yaz to place it back on the shelf. She can practically feel the warmth of her friend’s embarrassment as it radiates from her in unsteady waves. “Our chapter closed a long time ago. Whole book, actually. We kept meeting in the wrong order, always had to compare diaries, figure out where we were up to. Still have mine…” Her voice trails off thoughtfully before she drags her mind back to the present. “Don’t go looking for it. It’s not in here.”

Hunting for a diary about the Doctor’s dead wife had been the furthest thing from Yaz’s mind. Hesitantly, she asks, “Who were the other five?”

Sorrow creeps back into the air between them. “Long life. Not important. None of them are Jack, no matter what he might tell you.” 

“Oh, he didn’t --” she begins, but a thought springs to the front of his mind. “Graham did say Jack kissed him when he thought he was you.” 

The sorrow breaks ever so slightly as a smile sneaks across the Doctor’s lips. “Did he? Good to know he hasn’t changed.” As much as Jack irritated her from the outset, she has to admit, he had grown on her in the end. There’s something valuable about a man who is willing to give all of himself to total strangers. 

Anticipating Yaz’s next question, she adds, “He only kissed me once. Kisses mean less when you’re an immortal being, especially if you’re an immortal being with a long history of snogging every living creature that catches your eye. Not that I kiss around. Not really.” Her nose wrinkles. She’s really not making a good case for herself, is she? 

The Time Lord leans one shoulder against the same shelf that Yaz had claimed as her spot, eyes fixing on her hands as she toys with the cuffs of her jacket. This has very quickly grown awkward, and she doesn’t do well with awkward. Maybe she should go, pick up her work somewhere else in the TARDIS, somewhere with less people. Or somewhere with more people. At this point, she’s not picky. 

With a sigh, she pushes herself away from the bookshelf, fully intending to leave both the library and this conversation behind her, but Yaz reaches out a hand and grabs her wrist, gently insisting that she stay.    
  
“Wait.”

The Doctor’s gaze flicks down and then up again, confusion evident on her face. She doesn’t know what to say, so she doesn’t say anything. She just waits. 

It takes Yaz a moment to find the words to place to her thoughts. “If you need anyone, I’m here.”   
  
The Doctor’s bewilderment etches itself even deeper into her face. “I know. You’re all here. You and Graham and Ryan.”

A sigh slithers past Yaz’s lips, and she can’t help but slam her foot into the ground with a tiny frustrated stomp. “Not like that. If you’re feeling alone and you need someone to...y’know...lean on. Or cuddle with. I’m...I’m here.”

_ Oh _ . 

The Doctor’s mouth falls open in surprise as the idea finally takes root. A laugh slips past her lips. It isn’t meant to be dismissive; it is simply the euphoric release of  _ relief _ . She had spent so long fretting over a future in which Yaz might step away and leave her behind, weighing the stares and the questions and the glances and wondering whether or not this day might be the last day before the dams of Yaz’s patience finally broke. To hear what’s actually on her mind … despite the grief that still hangs heavy in her heart, the fear that sits perched upon her shoulders has lightened just enough for her to feel proper joy for the first time in ages. 

It’s infectious.    
  
After a moment of worry, Yaz also begins to giggle, until they’re both standing there, together, surrounded by romance novels and consumed by shared happiness.    
  
Courage seizes Yaz’s heart, and she takes the Doctor’s face in her hands. There’s a quick, “Can I?” before she gathers herself with a single, steeling breath and then plants a single kiss upon the Time Lord’s lips. To her surprise, she can feel the Doctor relax into her touch. Yaz’s gentle fingers sweep blonde hair aside and twin hearts flutter. 

When they pause, their noses hover a mere inch apart. The warmth of their breaths mix and mingle in the space between them, and electricity arcs. For a brief, wonderful moment, grief is forgotten.    
  
“ _ Oh _ , Yasmin Khan -- brave, wonderful, Yasmin Khan -- you can do that whenever you like.”


End file.
